


before the stars

by cloverdale



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Developing Relationship, M/M, One Shot, Season 3 Spoilers, Season 4 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 18:50:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12488492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloverdale/pseuds/cloverdale
Summary: you set my world on fire.[lowercase intentional]





	before the stars

****my love, do you remember a time before the stars?

a time when my family was just half the world away, when the stars of night sky were just dream, before great lions flew in the skies.

do you remember how we fell in love?

i do. i’ll never forget.

do you remember how we met?

i remember your eyes.

i have always loved your eyes. they were the first thing i noticed, all those years ago.

you were blessed with purple eyes, your mother’s eyes, galran eyes. in the legends people tell their children, they speak of eyes that burn with fire, that with a mere glance out of the corner of the eye, could have you enchanted. you have eyes like these.

we were just boys when we met at the garrison. i was just a boy from cuba, you had been brought in by the garrison. i was loud, with half an accent, you didn’t talk at all. you called the man they trained for the kerberos mission shiro, i called him professor shirogane. the garrison called him their finest pilot, the world knew him as the greatest pilot to ever come out of japan.

they said you could not look away when shiro flew. it was like watching a great bird of prey on the hunt, watching him fly. but if shiro was a bird of prey, you were an angel.

i watched you fly, and you were beautiful.

you were a fighter pilot, and i was a cargo pilot. i thought i wanted to be you.

then you left, and i was you.

i thought the joy i felt was because i was a fighter pilot, just like i’d always wanted to be.

it was not.

it was because i would have to pretend no longer, pretend that my eye did not to the curve of your cheekbones and the grey of your eyes when you entered the rooms, pretend that i could not tear my eyes away when they put you behind the stick.

do you remember the desert where we met again?

“who are you?” you’d asked.

i remembered you. i’ll never forget you. how could i?

your eyes were just as intense as i remembered.

you flew more with your hands than with your mind, just like i remembered.

you were as focused on the task at hand as i remembered. you called me unnecessary weight.

we found the blue lion. we had made it to the stars, just like we’d always dreamed. but no one knew. to them, we were gone.

do you remember our mission?

black, red, green, yellow, blue.

a great castle in the sky, as old as humanity itself.

_voltron._

free the universe. defend justice. bring hope. collapse the galran empire.

that was what voltron truly was, wasn’t it? a symbol of hope.

you remember our team?

shiro, bound by duty. pidge, with her family scattered to the stars. hunk, who could never stand by and watch people suffer. allura, the princess of a people lost to time. coran, who had already survived a war.

do you remember the first time we laughed together?

_i say vol, you say tron. vol—_

tron, my love. i know you don’t get why we do it that way. it’s okay.

we were a team. we were a family. we would always have each other’s backs.

or so it seemed.

i realize now how lucky we were to have lived.

do you remember the first battle?

i remember we were so far away from home, clad in strange armor, flying alien warships. a crystal glittered over my head. coran was with me, a man who watched his planet fall, his king die, and his people burn.

how does he do it? how can he go on, with such a weight on his soul?

i tried to protect him. i remember that too.

it was the last thing i remember before your smile in the purple light of a poisoned crystal, and you eyes glowed. _“we are a good team,”_ i’d said, and you’d smiled, and it was if i was staring straight into the sun, burning and bright and painful and beautiful.

you said you cradled me in your arms, but i don’t remember that.

do you remember the blade?

in the space between two stars, in a whole in the sky, you found your people again, a warrior people, your mother’s people.

you felt you found a place, a place you’d never had on earth. i had an island in the middle of the sea, but you never remember the desert that forged you for longer than you were there. your home was shiro, but even he had not been there when you needed him most. no one ever was.

they hurt you, and the red lion went for you when i could not. red and i, we have always cared for you.

they tell you the center of the universe is relative, but we share the same center. you have always been the center of ours, since the day we met you, at the garrison, on a galra cruiser.

they fought at our side, and i will never forget that. but i will never forgive them. for hurting you. for letting you think your life didn’t matter.

who would i be without the fire of your eyes?

do you remember the day we lost our leader?

shiro has been to hell and back, and yet, he keeps going. people like him, skilled and suffering and haunted by happiness, deserve so much more than their life gives them, but when are heroes ever happy? if he had been born a century ago, they would have called him a hero in the great wars that were waged on earth. in every reality, shiro is a hero. he does not stand by. he is more than the things people have done to him.

he lead us into battle that day, as he always did, every day, day after day, even after the prison, even after the arena.

you tried to fight the emperor of the galra alone that day. even though that was years ago, i still can’t believe you’d do that.

actually, i can.

you have always done what first comes to your mind. before, it was how you flew. eventually, it came to mean rearranging our room on a whim. your impulsiveness was part of you, but was easier to appreciate when you weren’t scaring me half to death, jumping into battle alone, to protect the mission, to protect shiro, to protect _me._

shiro had always tried his to care for all of us.

he would have done anything to save one of us.

the battle ended, and we were victorious.

but then we went to the hangars.

he was gone.

we did not know then left you in his place, but as much as we tried, as much as i tried, the black lion would take no one but you. you never wanted to lead, but the black lion is the head of voltron. she does not make mistakes.

you were to lead voltron.

do you remember when you first lead us into battle?

it was not out battle.

you have always put the mission first. it was what you lived for. i have never been able to let go like that. i could not let you.

the red lion let me fly, let me bring you home.

allura was untrained, the red lion too quick, the black lion, with her wings of starlight, was not the lion you were trained to fly. that was not our battle. you led us to a planet with a sky of ashes that filled our eyes with dust and our lungs with fear.

we followed you like we followed shiro, but none of us could ever be shiro. you were never good with people, was not born to lead as he was.

but we rose again. we always, always rise. it was not our battle. not all of them are.

but we trusted you. shiro chose you, the black lion chose you. you were to lead.

and lead you did.

even when the man you called our rightful leader returned, the black lion chose you, i chose you. you led us across the stars, against the prince of the galran empire, into another dimension.

when he returned, there was no place for one of us.

you said things would work out. you told me not to worry, that i had a place on the team.

there was room for me.

there was room for me because you walked away.

do you remember when you left?

again.

you left me behind again.

the mission always came first for you. the blade needed you, but voltron, we could go on. you could not walk between both worlds, and the black lion found shiro once again.

you walked away, and i could not bring myself to stop you. i watched you go. i watched you walk the same path your mother did, when she left you and your father on earth to save her people.

it was what you wanted to do, the place you thought you had in this war. i wanted you at my side in rest, wanted to fight at your side in battle. but have always thought too high of great men. iverson was wrong to expel you from the garrison, you deserved to be there. even shiro makes mistakes, my love. he had already suffered the weight of several lifetimes by the time he turned twenty-five. time, commander holt, allura, duty, those things turned him to a leader. he was flawed too.

you not yet as sure a leader as shiro was, but it could’ve been. in another reality, you lead us. you are the black paladin, flawed but trusted, decisive yet merciful. perhaps in that reality, the universe was kinder to you.

but in this reality, keith kogane is impulsive. he is driven, and nothing will stand in his way. he fights with the sword, the weapon of a loner. he fights with only a shield to defend himself, and if given the option, it is only his sniper he would take with him in battle.

when you came back from the first great battle of the second half of the altean war, the earthen wars, you were white as porcelain, your long hair sticking to your forehead. you sat down, and did not move.

matt holt told me what happened, and my hands shook.

you are worth more than the mission, my love. you have never really understood this, and the blade of marmora taught you otherwise— _knowledge or death, victory or death,_ they say _._ it is the galran way, they say. you joined them to fight in this war, to give me a place, and that it how they taught you to do it. for teaching your this i can never forgive them. you have always deserved to live.

we achieved victory, but we almost lost you. who would i be without you, my love?

you deserved so much more. you deserved for someone to care about you.

i care about you. the team cares about you. and shiro cared for you, long before any of us knew you as more than the greatest pilot of our generation. he was not the same when he was found the second time after being lost.

because he had not been found at all.

do you remember when a paladin lost?

but shiro had not returned from the battle against zarkon.

the pilot of the black lion, the product of technology a thousand times more advanced than what existed on earth and black altean magic, he betrayed us. be betrayed us without knowing, for he did not know what he was, who he was, who he wasn’t.

with war knocking on the door, you never noticed. neither did the rest of us.

it was matt who noticed when pidge found him hiding in the stars, when shiro could not remember their mission to the edge of the solar system, to the moon of ice and snow on which they had been first been lost.

there was a fire in his eyes, but not as bright as yours.

there is no one else in the universe who shines as bright as you do. i have walked the mountains of a thousand worlds, touched the hearts of galaxies, danced under the light of dying stars. the universe is woven from shadows you left in your wake.

matthew holt had been nothing but kind before, but now he would look no one in the eye.

“takashi,” he said, his voice strong yet afraid. “his name was takashi shirogane, and he was the greatest pilot to ever come out of japan.”

shiro, the man, the clone, whoever he was, trembled under matt’s gaze “i didn’t know,” he whispered. “i didn’t know.”

your face was as unreadable as it was when i first met you. i could hear in the increase in your breath. i felt your fists clench at your sides. i remember sliding my hand onto your shoulder, how warm you were when you pressed yourself into my side.

but then the siren sounded.

war was coming, and we took to the nearly impenetrable alien warships. but when you and i got to our lions, there was no response.

the red lion would not have me. but when you came running to see what happened, she took you instead.

and black?

she was untouchable, eyes of stars, wings of moonlight.

her true paladin lost, his second in command at his rightful place, her returned paladin not him at all.

she was waiting, waiting for someone she trusted could lead.

decisive, calm, collected in the face of danger.

that is the black paladin.

do you remember when i became your leader?

i, admittedly, do not.

the black lion would let no one fly her. the castle was falling, the lions separated, the blade nowhere to be found. i remember my heartbeat, a hummingbird in my chest.

i remember you in the armor of the red paladin for the first time in months. you curled the end of your hair around yours fingers and pulling your helmet over it. you said nothing, but i could tell you did not want this.

you knew what being a paladin meant to me back then. you expected me to be angry. but i could feel nothing besides our destruction on the horizon. i felt the cold walls of the castle, of utter uselessness. the team needed me. it needed the black lion.

i felt a sniper rifle form in my hand, a weapon black as the vast emptiness of the night sky.

it was the black lion’s call. the bayard was mine. she was mine to fly.

i was the black paladin.

you were the first to take me as your leader, allura supportive but unsure, pidge and hunk not thinking of the battles to come, but recalling the days in the simulator at the garrison when i was their fighter pilot, and they my comm officer and engineer. those days felt like such a long time ago, when i was their leader, when we consistently crashed a ship i flew threw a computer generated sky.

when we met in the desert, you called me unnecessary weight. when i flew the black lion, you were the first to stand at my side.

you were always at my side. in the mess hall, the break room, preparing for battle, fighting for the coalition.

you took my first steps with me, when later, we returned home.

do you remember the day we returned to earth?  
battle scarred and battle worn, we took our first steps on the island on which shiro was born.

i forgot how the sea smelled.

it was colder than the ocean i knew, my ocean, half the world away. different plants grew in clumps high on the sand, the water bluer than veradero beach.

but it was earth.

this was my planet. _our_ planet.

i was home.

i stood in the surf, the waves at my waist. i let my helmet drift, and it bobbed softly on the sea. i closed my eyes, and inhaled the sea.

i could still feel my eyes on yours.

and even as the members of japan’s garrison branch, clad in the greys and whites and oranges i had once been so proud to wear, clamoring over the alien ships in the sky, the girl with white hair and strange marking on her cheeks, the man who looked like their ace pilot but was not, i did not move.

i let the ocean pull at me. i wondered what my family was doing, on an island on the other side of the world. i had been years. would still mourn me? pray for me? did my nieces and nephews remember me at all, or was i just a picture of a boy in an orange and white uniform on the mantle?

the war was not done, and across the stars, battles raged, but i let myself breathe. for the first time since the black lion chose me, i breathed. shiro was gone, zarkon still reigned, and people suffered, but still i let myself go.

you held me in your arms, standing taller than me in the shallower water. your hair tickled my face. you pulled away, and wiped the tears i hadn’t noticed spilling from my eyes. you laughed and smiled and there was fire in your eyes.

you pressed your lips to mine,

and i _burned._

 

_i remember everything, my love._

_i remember the day i met you at the garrison, all those years ago._

_i remember i met you, and you set my world on fire._

_nothing was ever the same._

_but my love,_

_do you remember the rest of our story?_


End file.
